


Chess Game For Life

by aliitvodeson



Series: And it's the strangest thing [3]
Category: Age of Apocalypse (Comics), X-Men (Comicverse), X-Men - All Media Types
Genre: Abuse, F/M, Injury, Kidnapping, Manipulation, References to Torture, Sexual Assult, Stockholm Syndrome, hurt/comfort but not really, prisioner, references to rape
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-24
Updated: 2015-06-24
Packaged: 2018-04-05 21:25:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,639
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4195491
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aliitvodeson/pseuds/aliitvodeson
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Clarice is nothing more but another little pawn to move around, in Fabian's eyes. But the skinny pink girl with doe-like green eyes has thoughts not even the master manipulator can read.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Chess Game For Life

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by thecorteztwins drabble found here - http://thecorteztwins.tumblr.com/post/122047166426/havent-seen-much-of-aoa-fabian-and-blink-lately
> 
> This is Clarice’s perspective on the events, cause I just couldn’t let it go. AoA Fabian is a bag of dicks, so warnings for torture, abuse, past rape, mention of rape, non-consensual touching all apply, as well as warnings for injury and blood.

Sometimes, when he goes out and she’s been good, when she’s behaved, he lets her out of the tiny cage he likes locking her in. He will unlock the cuffs around her wrists and the chains that link her to the wall, and lets her walk around the room. Or he’ll leave her in the mockery of a bedroom, letting her sleep in resembling comfort. She always takes advantage of it, always looks for a way to get out, even locked in as she is. She tries to make a plan to get out of the hell that has become her life.

How long had it been? Days, months? It wasn’t right to think about that. There was no way to tell. There was no one to ask, no one but him, and she wasn’t about to ask that sort of question in the little bits of bravery she had. She knew there were others, others like her, held here, in dark rooms like hers, but she couldn’t find them. Couldn’t talk to anyone but him.

She hasn’t seen anyone else since her capture however long ago.

If being forced to interact with him wasn’t always so terribly horrible, Clarice would perhaps find it a relief from the sheer mind numbing terror of life as a solitary prisoner. He’s the only one in the whole complex that she hears making noise, the only person who can respond to her actions, because her imagination never does. She’s left fearful, left shaking, but when she hears him come through the hallway and she’s able to go to the door, she does anyways. Creeps up from where she’s crouched in the corner, softly pads to the slightly open door, looks through the crack at the man that sits with blood running over his chest.

And he looks right at her.

Her heart, close to the ground when she kneels at the door, seems to stop. There’s nothing like his gaze, nothing like the sticky sweat of her palms when his eyes fix on her. She gulps, and pushes her way past the door, walking forward with footsteps that seem to jump every which way as he takes a breath, slowly pushing past the fear that grips her chest and makes her way to the bed.

He talks, and she hears him, but her eyes are on the wounds in his sides. How easy would it be for him to fade away, for his blood to keep leaking out, for him to die on this bed. Could she hurry it along? Find another point to press in, to cut open, to bring his fall at the hands of her own thin fingers. And then he says a name she never thought she would hear him say, says the name of a man that she prayed would stay safe from all of this, a man she had fought so hard to press to the back of her mind and keep in the past.

He says the name Creed, and Clarice is suddenly in wide eyed shock over that he would know to say that to her.

He bids her closer, and she doesn’t move, and he does it again and she walks to the side of the bed, sliding down to her knees as she stares at the wounds in his side. She doesn’t know why he hasn’t already healed. He used his powers to fix worse wounds on her without a thought, cleaned up blood and bones but now his side is open and gaping and _wrong_.

“Look at the edges yourself.”

Her body doesn’t move. She can’t make it move, can’t force her head to follow his orders and get in close to the blood. So she says, giving up on moving, “I see.”

Then there’s a hand on her arm, and he pulls, and she topples downward, until her eyes are against his skin and she can see deep into his ribcage and right there is the edges of the wounds he talks about.

He speaks, but she doesn’t hear the words, and all that she can make in response is a soft whimper.

He lets her up anyways.

With the pressure gone from her head, she rocks back onto her knees, and there’s the bed again, and it’s so much easier to simply lean against it rather than move anywhere else. When she looks across the room at the doorway that waits for her, it swims in her vision, and there no way she’s going to make it. So she stays still instead, resting her shoulder against the bedframe and closing her eyes until he comes back over.

Something in the sight of the first aid kit kindles a feeling within her. She knows what to do with those things. She knows how to use them. She can ignore what he taunts her with about never seeing them, because she has. Mister Creed taught her how to dress wounds and close them up and keep them clean. She reaches her hand out to them, and then freezes, realizing what she’s done. A furtive glance of green eyes at him, and then she’s given the unexpected permission to use them.

Clarice picks up the disinfectant bottle with hands that stay steady, even when she’s pouring out the liquid onto his side, wiping it up with gentle swipes of the cloth.

He could die here. He could bleed out, blood staining the bed and sheets and floor and his body stiff and white on the ground. The wound could get infected, turn puffy and red and black and green and he’d waste away to the afterlife in pain. She could kill him, take advantage of his weakness and strike, force him down and make him in pay in the final way for everything that he’s done to her.

She knows all of these things could happen.

She wants him to die.

But if he dies now, if this is the end of the man she hatefully calls, “Lord Cortez,” then what will become of her? Clarice harbours no delusions about her situation. Mister Creed doesn’t know where she is. She doesn’t know where she is. No one but him knows the way out of the compound. Her powers won’t even offer her escape, for the collar around her neck will be just as much locked after his death as before.

She can’t let him die.

Her fingers brush her skin, and she pulls back at that sudden realization that he truly is all that she has. This is it. Her life is tied up in his. If she wants to live long enough to see the Xmen again, then she has to make sure that he lives through this as well. At least until she can have an escape route in place.

And so it’s with that heavy knowledge in her heart that she doesn’t fight away from the hand that rests on her head.

She keeps her eyes on the work in front of her, on the impersonal fact that thereès a body and wounds and materials that she can use. She looks at those and not at the parts of him that would identify him to her mind. If she just looks on what she’s doing, she can pretend that he’s one of the team, someone that she truly does want to live. She can lie to herself and say that these wounds are on the body of a man that she prays for, that he’ll keep living.

She sits back when it’s over, when the skin had been cleaned and the blood wiped up and the bandages securred on his side. Her gaze stays on those bandages though, on the impersonal, even as it all gets even more tied to the personal. To her situation. His words come in, hit her brain, and she’s pulled out of pretending that he’s someone she cares about with the very knowledge of what he’s promising her.

She forces her eyes up to meet his when she can’t pretend that he’s part of her team any longer.

Clarice wonders if he knows what he’s doing with this offer of kindness. If he knows how close he’s coming to behaving like Shadowcat with her training regime. Complete this run, win this mock battle, and you’ll get enough food in your belly to make it through another night. He’s doing that, trading with her, rewarding her, pushing her to do this sort of thing again. He knows so much about the Xmen, Clarice wonders if he knows that his actions are a copy of her teachers’.

Unfeeling, she looks at his face as he makes his offer, taking it in with an emotionless face. Nothing to show. She doesn’t even know what he’s trying to do with this. He’ll give her something nice, and what? She’ll stop trying to plan out an escape?

No, Clarice isn’t sure what he means when he gives such an open ended offer, and so she just keeps looking at him, keeps blinking, balanced on her heels and looking up at the man who has made her life a living hell and is now trying to present something that’s not so bad.

Her throat is dry when she swallows.

No words come to mind when he gives her space to speak, and she doesn’t try to make any up. It’s easier, simpler, to not respond. To just let him keep talking, to let him keep control. The wounds are treated, and he’s made his offer, and maybe this will just all end in him letting her go back to her room and try to get something resembling a rest.

And then he takes her hand and brings it down between his legs, and those thoughts go right out the window.


End file.
